When you think about useful fields you might want to break down or group by…surprise, surprise: all of the most useful fields are usually high-cardinality fields, because they do the best job of uniquely identifying your requests. Consider: uuid, app name, group name, shopping cart id, unique request id, build id. All incredibly, unbelievably useful. All very high-cardinality.

And yet you can’t group by them in typical time series databases or metrics stores. Grouping is typically done using tags, which have a hard upper limit on them.

We spend a lot of time gathering metrics for our network, servers, and many things going on within the code that drives Etsy. It’s no secret that this is one of our keys to moving fast. We us…
We spend a lot of time gathering metrics for our network, servers, and many things going on within the code that drives Etsy. It’s no secret that this is one of our keys to moving fast. We us…